Black silhouette design of birds lifting off from the tip of a bullet, shown as a blackwork flash drawing on a white background.

Birds rising from a bullet

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a bullet standing upright with its upper part broken away, and a flock of small and large bird silhouettes rising from the opening. The shapes are solid black with a rough, speckled texture on the bullet body and no fine internal linework. The image is monochrome on a plain white background, with the birds spread across the top half and the bullet filling the lower half.

Blackwork Bird Flight Silhouette

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and let the accordion man have his tea. You want the one about the bullet? Then hush. My grandmother's cousin, Ivy Mather, swept the floor of the Gannet Ballroom for thirty-one years, and she swore on her mother's Bible that every word was true.

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After the war the bandstand was still propped on oak beams, and Ivy found a spent round wedged in a crack between the boards, right by the cloakroom hatch where the coats hang. She cleaned the brass with vinegar and set it on the sill above the cloakroom window, between a dish of pins and a cracked saucer. Nobody thought much of it. The band played their waltzes, the coats steamed in the corner, and the lamps hummed like bees.

One November night, with the hall empty and the chairs upended on the tables, Ivy picked the thing up and told it everything she could not tell her husband. Her brother Sid had gone out across the water and never come back, and she had kept his cap in a drawer for six years. She held the casing to the lamp. It was warm as a loaf. Then the top of it broke away in her hand like pastry, and out of the gap came birds, a dozen then a hundred, swallows and starlings and one great grey gull, up through the rafters and out the high window over the harbour.

She never found a feather on the floor, and she never wiped the sill again. So if you ever hear wings in the rafters of this place, don't you dare shoo them out. Now, who's going to ask me to dance?